Viking Mars Mission Might Have Missed Life 136
Johan Louwers writes "The Viking mars mission in 1976 might have missed signs of life due to not completely working analysis equipment. GC-MS on the Viking 1976 Mars missions did not detect organic molecules on the Martian surface, even those expected from meteorite bombardment. This result suggested that the Martian regolith might hold a potent oxidant that converts all organic molecules to carbon dioxide rapidly relative to the rate at which they arrive. This conclusion is influencing the design of Mars missions. We reexamine this conclusion in light of what is known about the oxidation of organic compounds generally and the nature of organics likely to come to Mars via meteorite."
Sign of the times. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sign of the times. (Score:5, Funny)
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Also saw The Who, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, AC/DC that year. and a bunch of others. the only one I was actually in a condition to remember is the Black Sabbath concert, and I just have some hazy memories.
So, yeah, If I had been shot to mars (and i'm not saying I wasn't, it sounds possible) I would possibly have messed up some tests myself.
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(graduated HIGH school in '76)
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That was fog permeating my entire dorm? Always wondered what that was. But, it was strangely pleasant...
Bezerkly '76
missed? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:missed? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:missed? (Score:5, Funny)
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I dont understant the story (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I dont understant the story (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I dont understant the story (Score:5, Informative)
The big summary of the article is this:
It's not due to the fact that the experiment was broken. It's just the way it was designed.
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So it was broken by design?
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So if the environment is so harsh that it will destroy mere molecules, the quantum leap here goes uhhh perhaps a complex cellular or multicellular organism can survive duh.
There is no life on Mars.
Why not try again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather than try to deduce why the analyses of 1976 didn't show signs of organic compounds on the surface, why not just perform better tests now with the next Mars mission?
Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should there be ANY future missions? (Score:2, Funny)
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we can multitask! We can kill & explore & educate & entertain all at the same time. The $400 million or whatever spent on a single unmanned probe is money well spent; not cheap, but not out of scale with any number of public or private projects. If we must, lets sacrifice 3 summer blockbusters each ye
Lifetimes of unmanned Mars probes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why not try again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You think that's silly, wait until you find out what missions were based on 30 years ago!
But seriously, what _else_ are we going to base it on?
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Re:Why not try again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Obligatory conspiracy theorist answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory conspiracy theorist answer (Score:4, Funny)
Would "they" be the government or the martians?
Re:Obligatory conspiracy theorist answer (Score:4, Funny)
In short - no life on Mars. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Hard radiation on surface - not good.
2. Virtually zero atmosphere - not that good.
3. No (or little water) - not good.
4. Highly oxidising compounds on surface - very bad.
Each in themselves, not a show-stopper. Two - err... All of them == no life. Well, not as we know it (Jim - sorry).
As a biochemist, I wouldn't expect any form of life (AWKI) to survive those conditions; not even if I were allowed to tweak every other possible variable to the organism's advantage. It would be nice to be proved wrong - but I don't think so.
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Re:In short - no life on Mars. (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like these [slashdot.org], recently discovered in a South African gold mine?
Except for the water part (which Mars may well have underground), they seem just about perfectly suited to the environment on Mars... They don't need an atmosphere, they depend on radiation, and they have a sulfur-based metabolism rather than using oxygen.
Sounds like a good match... We should look for something like those, rather than trying to find types of organisms that, as you point out, have a very, very low chance of surviving on Mars.
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Which wouldn't help them on Mars. Unlike Earth which has an abundance of radioactive materials, Mars has virtually none that we know of. AFAIK, it's part of the reason that the planet is dead (tectonically, that is).
Re:In short - no life on Mars. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Hard radiation on surface - Deinococcus radiodurans.
2. Virtually zero atmosphere - anaerobes (in general).
3. No (or little water) - I forget the genus.
4. Highly oxidising compounds on surface - cyanobacteria.
Granted, it would be complex, but the features we want of each bacteria could be merged (as I said, not an easy of quick process, but in principle possible) to give a bacteria that could fit the bill. And if we can design one to, the natuer can evolve one to (in fact, nature has evolved things that we couldn't even begin to think about builing).
I agree with previous poster, study the past; but a new mission focused on this is nessicary. We have better devises and methods for analysing samples.
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I was pointing out that each of the conditions I listed (and there are many more) had it's own special challenge to known (or even hypothesised) organisms. Note that I used a scale of "Not Good" to "Very Bad"; I didn't use "Impossible".
What I was trying to say was that taken individually these condi
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Consider the dry valleys in Antarctica, nearly as harsh except for the radiation, which you can avoid by living a few centimeters down.
And yet you have it incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
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Life seems to be very adaptable. I am pretty sure that not environment on earth have been found to be devoid of life. They found living bacteria on the less of the Surveyor camera that had sat on the moon for like two years!
From what I know of history people thought that the deep sea would be lifeless as well. I mean think of the total lack of light, the cold, and the pressure. No life as th
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It's a pretty big leap from "no life as we know it" to "no life," especially since any life on Mars would be, pretty much by definition, "not as we know it." It seems like a bad habit of convenience in science to use ignoran
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Amphibian 2: Yup, but we sure made it didn't we?
Amphibian 1: They said we couldn't survive out here because it was dry. No solvents for our biochemistry. But we just carry the solvents with us.
Amphibian 2: And they said we could never breathe out here!
Amphibian 1: Yeah, the fools were still thinking gills. Gills are so last geological period,
Amphibian 2: And they said we couldn't get around without a liquid substrate to push against.
Amphibian 1: There's nothi
Oh give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still convinced by that. I don't think life could have existed on Mars today without transforming its environment, and I don't think it could have existed in the past without leaving huge traces - and it would be very unlikely that it should die out, too. Life as we know it just doesn't behave like that.
But the difference being... (Score:1)
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But still, as you point out, we know how life works on ONE planet. How can we assume that it always works like this?
I think that the idea is that some rudimentary life form could exist on Mars and unable to evolve and thrive into somethign very complex because of the environment.
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when I was a paper boy I read.. Life found on Mars (Score:3, Interesting)
deep in the martian soil.
As far as advanced life, well think about how many stars there are, followed by how many solar systems, and the expanse of the universe, heck... an alien life form may be so far out there that we'd never make contact, but heck, it's possible that there's life
out there.
Re:when I was a paper boy I read.. Life found on M (Score:3, Informative)
As TFA explains:
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I guess that until we go t
detected oxygen disequilibrium (Score:2)
The oxygen disequiblrium found in the Viking soils was attributed to peroxide in the soil caused by UV bombardment. This didnt rule out life, but provided a non-biotic alternative explanation.
A re
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Perhaps manipulation from the right wing of our government thinking that we were not ready for the information.
So how did these "right wing" people manage to control the Carter administration a few months later and all those scientists? And how come the actual data from Mars was so inconclusive?Spending my Powerball winnings (Score:2)
1. Win Powerball
2. Phone Dr. Gilbert Levin
. . .
3. Fame and glory!
Of course I wouldn't get the Nobel Prize -- I would go down in history as the chump who spent his Powerball winnings on a Mars probe when he could have had a powerboat and a whirlpool b
This is sort of old (Score:5, Informative)
We haven't found life, why don't we seed life? (Score:1)
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1.) There might really be life there that we're missing. If we "seed" Mars, we taint any future observations. We might even end up overwhelming it (eg, non-native invasive species).
2.) What do you send? As others have noted, the environment on Mars is extremely hostile to life as we know it. We could spend half a billion dollars sending a capsule with some fancy extremophiles there only to have them all die.
3.) Assuming they survive, in a radically different environment, they may n
How rude. (Score:2, Funny)
Another remote possibility... (Score:3, Insightful)
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G'day mate! You've probably ne'er tried any of these mushrooms - here you go. See the 'roo now, mate?
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Testing for Life on Mars (Score:3, Funny)
with apologies to Father Guido Sarducci...
Alternative 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and the 'missing' scientists were all on Mars working on the terraforming.
Trouble was, it was supposed to be an April fool joke but got showed about a week later causing Orson Wells/War of the Worlds chaos for a few days until the BBC issued a release saying it was all a joke. A book came out about ten years later saying it was all real and the BBC had been forced to cover it up.
To be clear, it was a spoof - it had lots of people in it who are now well known actors but at the time were unknowns.
Alas, apart from a few very grainy clips, it has never been reshown and is almost impossible to find.
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Re:Alternative 3 (Score:4, Informative)
Quoth the Wiki:
Watch the entire show @ http://www.thule.org/brains/aroundtheconspiracy.ht ml [thule.org]
well duh (Score:1)
Were the Viking landers faked? (Score:2)
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You have it all wrong: they claim NASA covered up the results of the Mars Viking landings and faked the moon landings.
Typical (Score:4, Funny)
Just Means Not Conclusive (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing that I continually like to point out is that "life" at a basic level is agressively replicant. If there is any life that is a little successful, it explodes and tries to fill every nook and cranny and does it as fast as it can. If there is life anywhere on Mars it should be easy to find if we take a wide survey testing multiple places at multiple times of the Martian year. Just two tests isn't sufficient to call it either way.
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That assumption is working from Earthlike conditions. Life is successful here for reasons that don't apply offworld; namely the abundance of liquid water, plentiful useful chemical compounds in the air, and a thick atmosphere coupled with a magnetic field that blocks most h
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It seems reasonable to expect that if they were robust enough,
Repeat after me (Score:1)
Don't think so... (Score:2)
There is no life on Mars. There probably never was life on Mars. There is no ecosystem to protect. Let's terraform it.
Suggested improvement for the viking experiment (Score:2)
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Or... (Score:1)
obviously (Score:1)
They didn't miss it, this is what really happened. (Score:1)
Video Proof: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-26801554
Viking Mars Mission Might Have Missed Life... (Score:1)
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Future life on Mars is more important to me (Score:2)
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Oh, and you might want to look into how you'd go about giving Venus a useful rotational period (it's something godawfully long now, 240 odd days), and a protective magnetic field. Otherwise, you can pretty much forget about living on the surface; you
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Peroxide Solutions (Score:2)
There were reports a few years ago about a new analysis of Viking GC-MS data that showed a 24.5-hour respiration cycle in the regolith samples it gathered. We might have to stop calling it regolith and start calling it soil.
Josh
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I don't understand. What do you mean by "fly a set of sample materials"
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I didn't know that! Even the bacteria sample from the Surveyor 3 camera was considered likely to be contamination on Earth.
so a flesh eating 'oxidant' is what exterminated - (Score:2)
LoB
The Viking Mission Did Find Life on Mars (Score:5, Informative)
Klaus Biemann was a famous and respected chemist and mass-spectrometrist who had done much of the original work in developing GC-MS, While Gilbert Levine was a relative unknown who had run a start company that sold environmental testing equipment based on the LR technology Levine had invented. Bieman to it as an affront to himself the chemists and mass spectrometry as a technique that a biology experiment could detect life when his chemistry experiment could not. So he took it upon himself to launch an unremitting campaign to prove that the LR results were a false positive. The claimed to have proved this to be so but this was specious as no one had proposed a chemical model that would reproduce the Martian LR results in the laboratory.
Meanwhile experimental tests helped show the reliability of the LR experiments. Samples of Lunar rock from the Apollo missions tested negative, while Antarctic ice cores, which had been shown to contain micro-organisms at a very low level, gave positive results. However Biemann and other chemists, together with those that just simply refused to believe life on Mars is possible, had more or less silenced the debate.
I write this as a chemist who had just started work on GC-MS (and to me Biemann was something of a hero) at the time of the Viking landings (yes I am ancient). However I am convinced now after looking at the evidence that there is a strong case to argue that the LR experiments on the Viking landers provided strong evidence for the presence of microbial life in Martian soil.
Re:The Viking Mission Did Find Life on Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
If biological molecules are available they can facultatively use them for growth as in the case of Levine's Labelled Release experiment. This means that there could be very low levels of organic material in the Martian soil yet living potentially active micro-organisms could be present. This would explain the negative result found by the Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry experiment.
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However I am convinced now after looking at the evidence that there is a strong case to argue that the LR experiments on the Viking landers provided strong evidence for the presence of microbial life in Martian soil.
No. There was a plausible non-biological explanation. And you need a lot more than the few data points you describe before we can determine the effectiveness of the LR test.Re: (Score:2)
O.K. What was it then ? I am still waiting to hear. If they can't reproduce it in the laboratory it is just speculation, unlike the results Levin got which was more than just a "few data points." Look at the data yourself the URL is given in a following post.
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First, the Labeled Release (LR) experiment could only run the test on two relevant categories of known soils, terran and lunar. That still is true. I consider that only a couple of data points. You shouldn't claim that you've discovered life based on that kind of evidence.
Second, no experiment has duplicated the LR results, but something chemically analogous to the hypothetical Martian soil type, "peroxide-modified titanium dioxide" has been demonstrated [nih.gov] to generate what was observed in the LR experiment.
Link to the Raw Data (Score:2)
Or (Score:3, Insightful)
Organic != Little Green Men. (Score:3, Insightful)